Over the time, email communications have become very critical to businesses and at the same time their volumes are increasing. This is particularly so with information technology workers, where receiving, for example, hundreds of emails a day, has become a none. To add to it, users do not delete any email communications because storage is cheap or for its future need. This causes communication overload and has become difficult to manage or retrieve it when necessary. Searching for a particular email communication or related data in such haystack hence has become an important activity and has become very hard and time consuming.
For example, most email systems today provide ability to search for emails. They provide for the usual search mechanisms such as time period based search, keyword based search, headers (from, to, cc) based search, etc. Plain search does not work any more as it takes lot of time. In keyword based search, it allows for searching for keywords occurring in the emails, either in the headers or the bodies of the email or both. The user has to come up with creative keywords to address complex searches. Despite this, the keywords used for searching are common place resulting in too many results requiring further time to retrieve the required email and related data. In the header based search, users are able to sort on the headers and then drill down for more information. However, this search too is time consuming. In certain email systems tagging or folder based searches are also used. In such case the user moves (or simply attaches a tag to) the email to container called a folder so that in future when the user wants to look at emails on a particular topic, a search can be made only in the relevant folder. However, folder concept is obsolete for its obvious reasons. Tagging labeling cannot be done for all mails. Simply reviewing large volumes of emails demands excessive time.
Further, current email search engines respond with emails as result even if the user is interested in the people involved in such email communications. For example, to find a particular person or the person's domain address, the user needs to find the specific email and then open that email to find the people involved in that email and identify the required person.
As a result, users are often overloaded with email communications with related data and less time at hand for searching them, when needed. This makes the process of sifting through email communications time consuming and inefficient. Therefore, a need exists for methods and systems to efficiently assist the user when searching for a particular email communication or related data. Specifically, an efficient system that provides user with the ability to retrieve a particular email communication or related data with greater ease, at a much lower cost of operations, is needed to address current email communication search limitations.